


detox

by aperfectsong



Series: backbone [5]
Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 21:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7547219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aperfectsong/pseuds/aperfectsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A clean house is a clean mind. Before/After MAD, Veronica POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	detox

 

As she walks away from Tad, back through the Neptune High parking lot to her car, Veronica battles four competing impulses: run, cry, get control, and cause maximum damage. She drives home, watching the yellow dividing lines of the road as if driving were her single focus. She holds the wheel straight. She pulls it toward her like a life preserver. She presses the gas just enough. She brakes at red lights. She breaks her life into steps. Small, attainable goals. She tries to focus only on the immediate: Get home. Get out of your bathing suit. Forget about Catalina Island. Only then does the feeling in her chest start to recede.

  
She does not text Logan.

  
It is about control. Standing him up gives her back some of the control she lost by the flagpole, makes her feel more like the Veronica she made herself into and less like the one she needs to distance herself from. That Veronica still wakes her in the night gasping as though it were happening again or maybe happening still. That Veronica pushes her to tell someone – made her think of telling Logan, made her plan it out in her head: what exactly she would say, how he would respond, the things he would say to make her feel less like a piece of herself was missing, less like she was something damaged. She lets this fantasy go. The open car windows drag it out of her and away. She doesn’t need Logan to hold the warring pieces of her together, or to run his hands through her hair like she is worth something, or to swear vengeance on her rapist as she tries to remember and forget at the same time. Not now, anyway, when it could have been him, when it was definitely one of his friends or maybe more of them, goading each other into it like a bad joke. She knows the way they get in these stupid, drunk groups, letting their combined testosterone fool themselves into thinking they can do anything.

  
Backup greets her at the door, roused from the dog-shaped imprint on her dad’s chair. She reaches down to pet his big head, so warm and solid.

  
“Hey boy,” she says to him though her voice shakes. “I’m back early,” she lies.  
  
In his dog way, he knows her better than anyone. He follows her through the house as she sets her bag down and goes into her bedroom. He senses, maybe, that she doesn’t really want to be alone.

  
He watches her open the bottom drawer of her desk. She pulls out a Seventeen magazine and shakes some papers loose from where she stuffed them months ago, in between an ad for perfume and a quiz Lilly had taken for her one upon a time: What kind of homecoming dress are you? She doesn’t dwell too much on the pink hearts Lilly made around the multiple choice answers she chose for Veronica, not the way she would have a year ago.

  
Veronica retrieves the fallen pages from the floor: the self-care instructions that the nurse handed her as she made her promise to come back for a follow-up. She follows the words with her eyes until they land on the sentence that says her blood tested positive for rohypnol. She had to see it again to make sure she remembered it correctly, to make sure it wasn’t some other drug that Logan didn’t bring at all. She is crying now, trying to make herself stop. Backup licks her knee and she makes a sound between a laugh and a cry as she hugs the dog to her chest.

  
She trusted him.

  
She wipes her eyes and collects the other pieces of paper. Inside a pamphlet she hasn’t opened in months, there is another page about the examination that she reads again as her heart pounds and Backup presses his warm body against her legs. She reads it through she knows exactly what it says – that without a police report, her kit will not be processed. In the months following Shelley’s party, she researched every aspect of the process of having a rape kit done, articles about the inefficiency of it, articles about the sealed kits crowding evidence lockers for the required two years before they expire, just to see if there was any way she could get around it. She learned that if the rape wasn’t accompanied by a murder or fit the profile of a suspected repeat offender; if, for example, the kit belonged to a drunk girl at a party of her peers, it was low priority. Without a police report, no one would ever process it. And for those who did file a police report– things got even messier. No, she can’t count on someone else for justice.

  
She stuffs the papers back into the magazine and replaces it in the bottom drawer. She sits on the floor and Backup tries his hardest to climb into her lap.

  
She is crying again. _Stop_ , she tells herself.

  
She wants to know if it is the things that happen to people that make them weak, or maybe what they do or don’t do about them. What is weakness, really, in a situation like this? What would a weak person do? Veronica tells herself she is not weak, but she wonders about all the things she has done to make herself strong. Was ditching Logan making a decision for herself or just hiding? Does she want comfort or solitude? If she wants whatever makes her look stronger, is that a weakness too? Since she made herself untouchable, has she become stronger or only better hidden?

  
The water in the shower runs cold. She even doesn’t remember coming into the bathroom.

  
Her cell phone is ringing in the other room, but she can’t bring herself to look at it.

  
Lying on her bed, she turns on her laptop. She opens her case file on her rape. It has a list of everyone she remembers at the party and a timeline of the events that is full of gaps. She scrolls through the names and highlights the ones she can approach. People who owe her. People who have something to lose.

  
Afterward, she lies in her bed and tries to sleep for hours. She wakes from dreams that are half-formed, unfamiliar rooms she cannot escape, places and people becoming other places and other people. In one of them, her teeth break apart when she bites down too hard, and she fills her hands with the jagged pieces of them.

  
At noon, Wallace texts to ask where she is. _Sick_ , she writes back. _Can you text the homework from English and history?_ It occurs to her that maybe she became friends with Wallace because she knows he is innocent—he wasn’t even in Neptune at all. He is the only one she can trust, but not exactly someone she could tell. Her eyes well up. If Lilly were here… If Lilly were here, it never would have happened—who would Veronica be then?

  
Her phone has four new messages from Logan that she doesn't read and two missed calls.

  
Backup is curled up on the foot of her bed, panting.

  
Her dad’s bedroom is still empty.

 

\--

 

At school the next day, she cleans her locker during passing periods. She avoids Logan. She avoids Wallace, too, and when she sees him, she makes herself appear busy and detached, so he won’t notice and ask if anything is wrong. She is so close to the surface, she can’t trust herself not to spill over. She has an image to maintain, even for Wallace. He looks at her sometimes with a kind of respect: admiration, maybe, for being tough in a town that hates her, for being feared but needed at the same time, and for always getting the information she needs out of people. She likes the way Wallace sees her. It makes her feel strong. It lets her see herself that way, too.

  
After school, she throws out dull, eraser-less pencils, crumpled post-it's, highlighters that don’t work, worn shirts with holes, and a few pairless socks she’s been saving for weeks. She is long-past hopeful that the missing ones would turn up in the bottom of her closet or under her bed. She imagines whole socks disintegrated into the fibers that fill the lint trap. Mysteries she can’t solve. She looks through folders from last trimester’s classes, which she decided to keep for a reason that escapes her now. She throws it all into a garbage bag. She tucks her laptop into her bag and wipes her desk and drawers free of broken pencil tips, dust, hair, and leftover shreds of notebook paper.

  
It has always freaked her out that dust is mostly dried, dead skin cells. That she can place a clean palm down on her desk and come away with pieces of herself. She sprays Pledge onto the paper towel and runs it over the surface of her desk and dresser, over the emptied drawers inside, on the walls and ceiling of her bedroom. Somehow, it helps her convert fear into anger into control.

  
Backup watches her from the bed, leery of anything that might precede the vacuum.

  
“It’s okay, baby,” she tells him when she brings it out.

  
Her father is back, but still at work.

  
She carries the heavy vacuum from room to room, it's mouth banging against her shins. Backup hides in her father’s bed and barks at the hum of it.

  
When she is done, Veronica cries in the shower, the gasping kind that comes from a place she doesn’t know she has inside her. When she stops, she turns the water off.

  
She has spent too much time since last year thinking about what Logan Echolls is capable of. Is bashing her car windows with a tire iron symbolic? He made everything in her world change after Lilly died. Still, she can’t quite get rid of the sense of longing she feels when she thinks of him.

  
She watches herself in the mirror. Her hair is dripping; beneath her robe, it leaves a wet trail down her spine. Her eyes are still red, smudged underneath with sleeplessness. She inhales the lemon fresh scent of Pledge coming from all the wooden surfaces in the house.

  
Then someone knocks at the door. She feels the air in the apartment thin and a sick feeling emerge low in her gut. She steps into her bedroom to grab the taser from her bag and slip it into the pocket of her robe, just in case.

  
She can see his silhouette through the curtain before she even opens the door. Maybe she should have known that Logan Echolls wouldn’t just let her ignore him. There must be an equation for it. Miss one date, get six text messages and two missed calls… Ignore said messages for 24 hours and make yourself scarce at school, get one late-night visit. She wrenches the door open, determined not to let him know how afraid she feels,

  
how small,

  
how weak.

\--

In the moments after she locks the door behind him, she listens to the beat of her heart and suddenly has no frame of reference for how it is supposed to sound. Her breathing seems to her a fake kind of breathing, like she is going through the motions but she can’t remember how to make the air do what the air is supposed to do in her body.

  
Backup pants next to her, eyes closed, his belly rising and falling heavily. He curls up into himself and closes his eyes. She is sitting by the door, silent except for her breathing, whole and herself, except for her red eyes, except for that feeling she can’t put down – that she is a marionette, unable even to look up and following the strings to the hands that control her movements.

  
Veronica can’t trust her own judgement. That’s the worst part. She wanted to press her face into his shirt and let him hold her in place. She wanted to believe his body language and his confusion. She couldn’t spot any of the tells she had come to associate with Logan lying—the barely perceptible shake of his head, as though anything he might say is preposterous, or the way he blinks a few times in quick succession. Instead, he just stared at her, his anger dissolving into something she couldn’t decipher. Guilt, maybe?

  
Her cell phone rings from her bedroom and Backup flinches awake to stare up at her with big, wide eyes. She doesn’t move to answer it. She sits for what feels a long time, until the sound of an engine cuts through the near silence of humming TVs in the apartments on either side of hers. Only then, does she inhale and stand up.

  
She wishes her father were here so she could listen to him quote movie lines back at the TV while spilling popcorn on the couch. She remembers then that she hasn’t eaten, just a piece of American cheese and a few handfuls of potato chips earlier. She opens the freezer and stands on her toes to peer inside at a few TV dinners and a box of burritos. But it all seems too require too much of a certain kind of effort for self-preservation she doesn’t have in her today. She is hungry but she doesn’t feel like eating. So instead, she moves through the apartment like a shadow, locking windows and turning off lights. Backup follows sleepily behind her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I couldn't quite figure out my short for A Trip to the Dentist without first establishing Veronica's POV on/after MAD, so I had to backtrack a little. I also want to write their eventual conversation during A Trip to the Dentist from Logan's perspective. In the show, their fallout happens so fast, I just want to slow things down a little. There will be at least one more short in this series.


End file.
